The role of crowd behavior and cooperation strategies during evacuation

Abstract

Crowd dynamics have constituted a hotspot of research in recent times, particularly in areas where developmental progress has taken place in crowd evacuation for ensuring human safety. In high-density crowd events which happen frequently, panic or an emergency can lead to an increase in congestion which may cause disastrous incidents. Crowd control planning via simulation of people’s movement and behavior can promote safe departures from a space, despite threatening circumstances. Up until now, the evolution of distinctive types of crowd behavior towards cooperative flow remains unexplored. Hence, in this paper, we investigate the impact of potential crowd behavior, namely best-response, risk-seeking, risk-averse, and risk-neutral agents in achieving cooperation during evacuation and its connection with evacuation time using a game-theoretic evacuation simulation model. We analyze the crowd evacuation of a rectangular room with either a single-door or multiple exits in a continuous space. Simulation results show that mutual cooperation during evacuation can be realized when the agents’ population is dominated by risk-averse agents. The results also demonstrate that the risk-seeking agents tend toward aggressiveness by opting for a defector strategy regardless of the local crowd densities, while other crowd behavior shows cooperation under high local crowd density.

Airport evacuation under panic conditions: a microsimulation modeling applied at Ottawa International Airport

“…Existing literature on pedestrian modeling evaluates pedestrian behavior [3][4][5] in business-as-usual and emergency conditions, not necessarily using the SFM. Mohd Ibrahim et al 24 implemented SFM to understand the evacuation behavior of heterogenous pedestrians, including risk-seeking and risk-averse. However, there is a clear gap in the understanding of how the different degrees of panic associated with crowd behavior influence evacuation time and pedestrian flows.…”

Mapping the knowledge domain of soft computing applications for emergency evacuation studies: A scientometric analysis and critical review

“…Due to the heterogeneity of crowd dynamics and the complexity of the environment, an interdisciplinary perspective should be considered to understand human evacuation behaviour (Bouzat and Kuperman, 2014). For instance, to model pedestrian dynamics, multi-disciplinary approaches, such as social force model (SFM), cellular automata (CA), fluid dynamics (FD), multi-agent simulation (MAS), and game theory, have increased understanding of mass movements and public evacuations by developing mathematical models for prediction of the crowd behaviours and pedestrian flow (Chen et al, 2021b;Haghani, 2021;Mohd Ibrahim et al, 2022;Yang et al, 2020;Zheng et al, 2009). Other interdisciplinary research that combines insights from Physics, Psychology, Operations Research, and Computer Science has focused on planning and optimizing certain important elements (e.g., crowd monitoring, building design, intelligent evacuation management systems, transportation allocation, evacuation path optimization, etc.)…”

Stair/escalator/elevator selection behavior of passengers in subway stations based on the fuzzy logic theory

“…The simulation of passengers' walking behavior on the platform floor can be realized with the help of the pedestrian dynamics model. [6][7][8] At present, the model used to simulate passengers' movement mainly includes the macroscopic pedestrian dynamics model and the microscopic pedestrian dynamics model. Macroscopic model [9][10][11] mainly refers to the fluid/gas dynamics model.…”